1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to robotic control systems, and particularly to an anthropomorphic force-reflective master arm that allows a human operator to map his hand motion to a remote slave tool in unstructured environments in which autonomous robots cannot be used.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is often necessary that a human operator manually control the motion of a remote tool being held by an arbitrary slave device, e.g., a robotic arm manipulating a device outside a satellite in space, an underwater robotic arm, etc. The remote slave device is sometimes located in a hostile or unstructured environment, which justifies the need to keep the human operator in a safe remote location. The interconnection between the human interface system and the slave device is arbitrary, and may use a dedicated or public network. The interface is designed to permit the operator hand-operated translation and rotation of the control, and to transmit such changes to the slave device so that the changes are superimposed to a current tool position and orientation.
An improvement to this human interface would provide the capability to simultaneously measure all hand changes in position and orientation in order to minimize the number of iterations needed for tool set up in a desired configuration. Forces and torques exerted on the tool by a workpiece would be streamed from the slave device to reflect back on the operator's hand. The interface must provide force feedback to let the operator feel the forces displayed on its motors. An increased force feedback gain is desired to provide acceptable fidelity and sensitivity to small force/torque feedback magnitudes because the interface inertia felt at the operator hand must be very small.
Thus, an anthropomorphic force-reflective master arm solving the aforementioned problems is desired.